Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Andy Coolquitt refers to these spaces as crack sites, and captures the images with either a small digital camera or an iPhone. At first he resisted the impulse to photograph these spaces to avoid an anthropological vantage point. He preferred to consider them more akin to vacation slides, even though perhaps you could argue there are some similarities between the two. Regardless, Coolquitt is interested in the residue of the social gathering, and the improvised gestures at creating a comfortable environment, i.e., seating, lighting, shelter, and storage—in his words, a literal understanding of design within reach. The photos exude a somewhat haunting feeling, where the evidentiary quality and the absence of the human presence are so high that you can almost see the way in which the interactions or lived situation took place without the bodies being present. In this way, I find they, not only preempt the shape of the social, they allow the residue of the social gathering to become an object as well.